yoshimasa niwa

A few days ago, the amazing Google Reader client, Reeder is coming to Mac!
Originally, Reeder is working on iPhone and iPod, which is the one of the best iPhone, iPad applications.

Currently Reeder for Mac is released as beta version and I love this but something I need is still missing. Yes, I wanted to have Growl desktop notifications like what I did for Tweetie last year!

I made a plugin for Reeder to enable Growl desktop notifications then it works good so far. When we’ve got unread articles on Reeder for Mac, it will notify us. Don’t miss the hot news! Of course in future, Reeder for Mac itself may support desktop notification though.

Actually I’m using Safari as a default web browser but sometimes I’m using Google Chrome. In this use case, I need to send some URL to the Safari – a default application which is defined in the preferences to open URL on Mac OS X.
I googled extensions then found there are no good extension to do that. If we don’t have it, we just create it!

To do this, we need to launch application from Google Chrome but it requires to call native code which Mac OS X provides. Fortunately, Google Chrome extension has a way to run native code inside extension, making a NPAPI plugin like FlashPlayer then including it to background HTML of the extension.
This article describe how to build an extension using NPAPI plugin to call native code inside it.

Getting Started

I push all source codes to my github repository so that you can download, tweak and make good things.
It includes XCode project, some configurations and plugin source code, extension JavaScript and HTML code.
If you already have git command, just clone whole repository from github.
If not, just take it as Zip or Tar from Download Source button on github and inflate it.

OpenCV is a library of computer vision developed by Intel, we can easily detect faces using this library for example.
I’d note how to use it with iOS SDK, including the building scripts and a demo application.
Here I attached screen shots from the demo applications.

Support Latest OpenCV and iOS SDK

Getting Started

All source codes and resources are opened and you can get them from my github repository.
It includes pre-compiled OpenCV libraries and headers so that you can easily start to test it.
If you already have git command, just clone whole repository from github.
If not, just take it by zip or tar from download link on github and inflate it.

% git clone git://github.com/niw/iphone_opencv_test.git

After getting source codes, open OpenCVTest.xcodeproj with Xcode, then build it.
You will get a demo application on both iPhone Simulator and iPhone device.

UIWebView is most important UIKit class of iPhone SDK, as you know, it includes all methods and functions of Mobile Safari.
Though, I doesn’t accept the “open new window” or “popup window” of the link.

<a href="somehere" target="_blank" />Open this link in new window</a>

If this kind of link are shown in the UIWebView and user clicks it, nothing happens. Of course UIWebView is high-abstracted class and we SDK developer can invoke only a few methods, so there is not complete but good solution for this problem.
The key methods are